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Come New Year’s Day, a huge chunk of the world is going to be writhing in pain as they search for a go-to cure for their hangovers. There’ll be a lot of Googling, and quite a few people will pin their hopes on a post or two that recommends some off-beat remedy based on science.
Be warned, reader: It’s probably bad science. A new paper published in the journal Addiction looked at 21 different popular remedies for hangovers that have been previously studied in scientific trials—and found that all of the evidence for the efficacy of those remedies was “low quality” at best.
In other words, even if a remedy showed some promise in an actual scientific trial, the trial’s scientific rigors crumbled under scrutiny. The findings can’t be trusted.
“There is generally a dearth of research in this area,” Emmert Roberts, a clinical researcher specializing in substance misuse at King’s College London, told The Daily Beast. “As a team, we were aware of many media and commercial endorsements of products encouraging people to try so called hangover ‘cures.’” Roberts and his colleagues were motivated to see whether some of the existing studies into these cures were actually legit—or whether they were built on specious data.
It’s already known that painkillers like aspirin will provide some relief. But the focus of this latest review was on previous trials for popular home-remedies that are often said to turn a hangover off, or outright prevent one from even happening—like prickly pear, curcumin, artichoke extract, loxoprofen, and clove extract.
All of the trials examined by Roberts and his team were randomized and included placebo arms. But they were extremely limited in scope, which surprised the researchers. “Only 21 trials, with a combined total of 386 participants, have been conducted worldwide” to study hangover cures, said Roberts. “When compared to an annual population of two billion drinking alcohol globally, this seems like quite a mismatch.”
Some of the trials also had some bizarre methodological problems. For instance, eight remedies were tested only on male participants. Some of the investigators behind those studies explicitly stated this was because “they were only interested in studying hangover treatments in men,” despite the obvious fact that “many women also suffer distressing hangover symptoms,” said Roberts.
Other trials also included imprecise measurements for alcohol intake and sloppy assessments of how hangover symptoms changed over time. None of the results from any of the studies examined have ever been independently replicated.
To be fair, the review did point out a few candidate cures that might actually help stop a hangover: clove extract, tolfenamic acid, pyritinol (available as a nootropic), Hovenia dulcis (Japanese raisin tree) fruit extract, L-cysteine (found in products like Rapid Recovery), red ginseng and Korean pear juice. All of these are known to have either pain-killing properties, or interact with GABA receptors in the brain (the same receptor system affected by alcohol). Roberts thinks these substances would be a great starting point for researchers interested in finding an actual hangover cure—if they can come up with a robust study and collect reliable data.
It wouldn’t be all that difficult to run such a study. Roberts and his colleagues suggest just a few simple steps that would help improve hangover cure investigations: pre-registering the trials, reporting the findings using internationally-recognized standards, and recruiting more women participants.
All of this might seem like a silly thing to study. There is, after all, an airtight cure for hangovers: not drinking. But teetotaling won’t be trending upward any time soon. Given how many people find themselves wracked by pain after a night of indulging in one-too-many, there’s definitely a demand for something that can help. If you’re reading this the morning after a raucous night out, you probably agree.